Ah, Christmas shopping

Christmas really is simply the most wonderful time of the year...

Providing you stay away from shopping centres and all of the people.  Shopping centres at Christmas are proof that misery and despair are accessible to anybody.  The public suck at the best of times, but they reserve a little extra something for the festive season.

I love how we commemorate the birth of a man who pleaded with us to eschew personal possessions by trampling each other half to death in the hopes of snagging the last Teenage Pregnancy Barbie at Target. Seeking salvation - you're doing it wrong, shopping anarchists.

And the person who came up with the phrase the customer is always right has obviously never worked with customers.

Having previously worked in a hotel chain, I can say with confidence that when a disgruntled customer thinks they are right, they are usually wrong, and a freakin' nut job, and would be banned from the establishment if I had my way.

Also, I don't understand the desperate need to get the parking spot closest to the door.  I imagine some people could do with a little wander from their car to the food court.

Getting the closest park doesn't make you special.  And you don't have a parking angel who gets you a good spot near the door, because celestial beings have nothing better to do than hover around your shit mobile and make sure you get a fabulous parking spot.

And how about the shop assistants in David Jones?  I believe some of the largest sticks known to man are shoved permanently up their backsides.  These people used to be required to think and calculate basic math equations in their head, old school style, but it looks like their sole duties now consist of glaring at you with disdain for daring to approach their counter, interrupting their Facebook status update and waving objects over a scanner until it beeps.  Liaising with these people equals slow death.  Thank goodness for online shopping.

Ironically, the shops that are the least annoying are the ones where you leave your standards, taste and any measure of class at the door - the $2 shops.  This is where you can buy all manner of faux-marble Greek and Roman statuary and cheap whore cosmetics.  Fortunately the pretentious gits of the world refuse to ever be seen in these stores.

Oh, and effing baby strollers.  These mini humvees are apparently designed to ensure your baby can survive an encounter with a herd of charging wildebeest.  While I can understand mothers of small, screaming little people being a tad cranky in the mall, what's everyone else's excuse at this most jolly time of the year?

Even if you aren't forced to liaise with humanity on your shopping trip, they may still get you through the air conditioning system, which kindly regifts the disgusting, contagious pathogens of hundreds of people as a present to you.

Merry Christmas!

I watched Home and Away.

Putting aside the piece of chocolate cake that I stole from colleagues last week at work, I'm a good person. And sometimes bad things happen to good people. For example, tonight I watched Home and Away. Here's proof.

Straight off the bat - mere minutes into the show - Number #1 girl uses a big word. I can't remember what it was but I was actually impressed.

Number #1 girl undoes all her good work during an argument by turning to her pantry and placing her face in such a distressed arrangement that made me think that someone ate her 12 pack of twisties. She must have been really sad or angry or frustrated or something.

Here's Number #2 girl. Another Oscar winner in the making. She's super sad or frustrated or depressed or something and I don't even know what she's going through because she also has no facial expression.

Now I feel like a bitch because expressionless lady actually lost her twin babies in her womb. But that doesn't change the fact that her only facial expression is expressionless. Who hires these people?

Watching teenagers sitting around in their lounge room watching AFL on television and drinking vodka cruisers and beer and making out and being bitchy to each and doing all the teenage angst things. I hate them all within seconds.

Spoiler: This guy doesn't do this show anymore.

Yay ad break. Head to the kitchen to make a cup of tea and find a hot poker that I can have on standby in case I need to gouge my eyes out.

Number #3 girl is concerned or angry or sad when she finds out her boyfriend of two weeks has "commitment issues". He's 20. His name is Tank.

The most concerning part of this scene is my realisation that those precious minutes it took me to watch it are lost to me forever. And now I have to live with that.

Number #3 girl gets home 18 seconds after her curfew.  The parents are waiting in the dark on the driveway with a location camera crew. Cue boring argument. Jesus, this show.

Whatever happened to Brax (pictured in the picture), the feared member of the River Boys? Just googled him. The car transferring him to jail ran off the road and plunged into a lake but HIS BODY WAS NEVER FOUND...

Ooooooh, ahhhh, ooooh, ahhh, the sun is rising over the ocean. That's a bit pretty.

Oh great, actors have just walked onto the beach and decide to speak. Sunset ruined. Oh great, here's more of them. It's a morning beach sunrise-ruining congregation. This scene would improve enormously if the actors went away so I could just watch the sunrise in peace.

More teenage angst. I feel like I'm not the target audience.

Thank the lord that's over.

Runs on the Cheeseboard.

We all know that Australia is in the middla ocean in the middla nowhere. A back of beyond, full of the Bush, the Outback, the Bushfire, the Cricket and big mobs of the Whoop-Whoop.

Our country is like one half of a pair of ships that pass in the night, except there isn't any other ship for miles, unless the other ships are lost or have been overrun by pirates who like vegemite on toast and a glass of milo before a night of pillaging on ye high seas.

The remoteness of Australia often gets my goat. You know when you're on a lilo in a pool and you get to the edge and you kick off with your feet to drift to the other side? I wish we could do that with Australia. We could traverse the world! I suppose the sharks would pop an inflatable Australia with their baby teeth in seconds.

One of my main gripes with our remoteness is during The Ashes. If you don't know what The Ashes are then how dare you.

The Ashes are an extremely tiny but important urn that is given to the winner of a series of cricket test matches between Australia and England.

Aussie cricketer Mitchell Marsh tucks
 into a cheeseboard because yum.

Cricket is a religion in Australia. It is an institution founded on the worship of skank slash loveable rogue slash cricket commentator Shane Warne and a strict set of beliefs. Like winning. 

And giddily jumping up and down when this happens. So happy. And then so sad. So sad. All the emotions. And that's just after one ball from a fast bowler, the dramatic divas of the cricketing world. Ours are called Mitchell. It's just easier to remember one name.

If you need me to explain cricket to you it goes like this: two teams, one wins. Although sometimes they play for five days and then shake hands, drink tea, and eat cheese and agree to a draw so no-one wins. It's complicated. 

It's also non-contact. At no time during a game is it acceptable to touch each other, until they all hug and drink tea at the end of a game after agreeing that this sport doesn't always need a winner, sometimes it's just nice to drink tea together. Lovely.

A lot of people think cricket is boring. Well many things are boring to those who unable to grasp the concepts of strategy or thinking.

I think you are probably going to get some enjoyment out of any sport if you attend in person. 

Live elite cricket, for example, highlights the speed of the game, the precision, the skill, the technique, the strategy, the dedication, the persistence. That's all worthy of an admission price, innit?

You may not love it, but you will appreciate something about the skill sets on show. Unless we're talking about the sport of boxing, in which case you may as well save your cash and just hang around the pub and appreciate that no-one has KO'd you yet.

I love my cricket. However at this time of the year - winter in Australia - any cricketing event of import involving my national team is played on the other side of the world, in another time zone, in another galaxy.

But now that this year's Ashes is finished, I need to find a way to get off London's Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) and return to a time zone that is vaguely, or, even better, specifically, connected to my every day existence.

Another Mitchell. So confusing.

While I happily exist on London time my home town of Canberra, Australia is not. It is from the future.

GMT was invented in England in the late 17th century to give English cricketers a general idea of when to stop their match for a spot of jam and scones, or cheese and crackers if that's your jam. 

And, to this day, the unruly GMT continues to ruin the sleeping patterns of cricket fans the world over.

A Tale of Two Warring Tribes

I’m off to the big football game on Saturday. The one where they play with oval shaped balls.

Collingwood versus Carlton at the Melbourne Cricket Ground, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia, the World, THE UNIVERSE.  

Should be fun, if I don’t die in the crossfire between two warring tribes.

I’ve made a lame attempt to learn a bit about these tribes, so I can negotiate my way out of a blood-soaked armed combat situation if the need arises.

Back in 1892 (or maybe it was 2189, I forget), a bunch of tribes joined together in Melbourne, Australia to create a new form of entertainment for the masses, to replace the previous form of entertainment that involved watching people die of bubonic plague or something. I don’t know; I was unalive then. 

One of these tribes was known as Collingwood, and everyone dressed in black and white and stripes and nothing else. They all looked very much like human zebras but they’d bust your chops if you said that to their faces so no-one did ever. 

The Collingwood tribe took fortress in a crowded, unhygienic place with historic buildings and, like modern times, most people worked in places and did other things when they weren't doing the work things. 

This tribe grew and grew until it had over 300,000 likes on Facebook which is important because Facebook likes meant everything to everyone in 1892.

The other tribe was known as Carlton, and to this day do much the same thing as the Collingwood tribe with their days, but they have only 225,000 likes, so what even is the point of them. 

Back in the day, both tribes spent much of their free time engaging in hobbies such as breeding rats and suffering from typhoid and cholera and other health related conditions. It was the fun, carefree days.

And since 1892, on one day of the week, both these tribes gather in sports grounds and watch men throw their balls, while they engage in cheering and alcohol drinking and the ensuing violent tussles and then go to bars to discuss all of those things in gratuitous detail. 

Both tribes still obsess day and night about the hunting and gathering of the points earned at these sporting fixtures with the aim of bragging about it the next day at the work places and while they huddle in shops to purchase caffeinated beverages. It’s just what they do.

I had a great thought the other day.

I had a great thought the other day.  It was pretty epic.

Not a Kim Kardashian inconsequential brainpop, but something great passed through my neural pathways.

Like something Einstein may have come up with if he hadn't spent all his time watching pink lady apples fall from trees. Where was that leisurely activity ever going to take him?

This shit happens to me often.  My brain did that thing where it cuts out like a hairdryer when you pull it away from the wall socket, sometimes mid-sentence. Actually more often that not mid-sentence.

Unfortunately the great thought eludes me to this day. Oh well. I might go and sit under my mum's lemon tree and see if the great thought returns.

Sequel to this post: Return of The Great Thought.

Dude, where's my holiday bubble wrap suit?

I’ve just spent ten nights on a tropical island. I shall call this island Hawaii. 

The place is horrible.  They should write that on signs everywhere in the world. Don’t go there. No-one go there. You’ll hate it. I guess the main point I'm trying to get across is STAY AWAY, IT’S MINE.

I know no-one wants to hear about someone else's summer holiday, so let me summarise:

• I did all the tropical things.
• I did not look at a watch. Mostly. There is a big  vintage clock on the Waikiki Beach strip, like anyone cares what time it is.  Most of the time I didn’t know what day it was.
  

To make you feel better about your non-tropical existence, I also conveniently captured a litany of issues from my travels. I shall call them Hawaii Problems. They are real problems:

• I ran out of my Australian Cadbury chocolate quite early on so I had to eat Hershey's. I can't untaste that.
• The drying of my favourite swimmers could not keep up with my thrice a day swimming schedule.
• The tiles in my hotel room were forever covered in sand. 
• I kept bumping into the same Americans in Waikiki and was compelled to start acknowledging their existence.

• I only know so much Russian and there's always the danger of bumping into an actual Russian-speaking Russian.
• They install some type of magnetic field in your brain when you arrive at Honolulu Airport so when you pass any of the three thousand ABC Stores in Waikiki you are forced to enter because of the electric charge emitting from their extensive souvenir magnet collection. Also, I'm not entirely sure this is how electromagnetism works, but it sounds like something an electromagnetist would say in a Hollywood movie.
• I was forever sunburnt because.... I'm from Australia and we don't really get access to sun so I'm not trained in the ways of the shade...
• The magical Waikiki salt water healed my reef rock wound like a boss in no time at all and I don't have a body of salt water in my street at home to heal all my future reef rock injuries.

So I’ve grown a little tired of talking incessantly about Hawaii this week, particularly given I’m not there anymore. I've returned to the glaciality of my frozen city, the mundanity of my livelihood, and the general unremarkableness of my existence.  Oh, that sentence isn't depressing at all. Hey, I'm a writer. We are depressing.

I'm going to write a comprehensive set of Frequently Asked Questions and hand them out to anyone who requests information on my what-and-whereabouts abroad.
 

See, every time someone asks about it the precious holiday bubble deflates just a little.  And you've got to protect that effervescent little blob that protects you from reality and all the people who want to pop it.  

I know the bubble won't last, but that’s okay, because I will take the soul-sucking fairy who pops it down with me into the chambers of hell. Terms and Conditions apply when you ask about my damn holiday.

The Curse of Hawaii

I'm off to Hawaii very very soon for a winter mini break. I last ventured to that horrible holiday destination in 2012. It's been a long time between mahalos. The first time I went I fell in love with it immediately in a very serious way. Now it's kind of a long distance thing. And before you ask, no, Honolulu never comes to visit me.

The reason I'm going to Hawaii in July is because my home town is thoughtlessly covered in gross wintery frozenness.  Also, I have a borderline pathological hatred of cold weather.

When I last returned to the beautiful, exciting, relaxing slice-of-heaven that is winter in Canberra, Australia, from the vastly boring, conservative public service mini-metropolis of Honolulu, I noticed something really strange - Canberra is nothing like Hawaii. It really needs to pull up its skinny hipster jeans and try a bit harder to be more like a tropical island and less like itself.

Canberra makes it really hard for me to like it most of the time.  It's the geographical equivalent of the so-called friend who reels you in but then keeps letting you down by being a cold-hearted biatch.  I don't know what I did to deserve ending up in a place that apparently doesn't do beaches, palm tress, pineapples or coconut water. 

Hawaii has screwed with my head.  At lunchtime I currently walk around depressing, cold, grey Canberra, full of depressing, cold, grey public servants when what I should be doing is hitting up Waikiki like Hawaiian surfer girl.

So I'm trying to remember all the hideous experiences I've had in Honolulu, like the time my suncream ran out and I had to buy emergency suncream, and the time I thought my donut lilo was deflating but it turned out to be a false alarm.

Remembering these horrible moments helps keep me strong during these dark days. Mahalo.

You're gonna need a bigger big screen, Canberra

Yesterday I went to The Cricket - England vs. the Prime Minister's XI in Canberra.  It was great craic.

Every year the PM asks several of his more flexible Cabinet Ministers, a few Australian international cricketers, and a bunch of up and coming kids, country bumpkins and blue heelers from local cricket teams around the country to attend Cabinet to make very important decisions on which the fate of the country rests, drink some tea, and then finish off the day with a spot of cricket. Some of that is the truth.  What is this, Watergate?

And they all said yes, that would be lovely thank you, so we had a match on our hands, old sport.  And the blue heelers did good. They didn't beat the England cricket team - no less - but they made it to the end almost. And they mostly returned the ball to their opponent after each over, but only when they were given a treat. Kids these days.

I love my cricket. I haven't been to a live game before, unless you count the time my mum took my sister and I to the MCG and we had to listen to the moronic alcoholics in Bay 13 for eight hours.

A lot of females I know think The Cricket is a big bore, which is rich coming from people who think watching 'how to paint roses on your toenails' Youtube videos is a fascinating way to while away the hours. 

Next up in my new busy, busy cricket calendar is the Big Bash League final, which Canberra will host in a few weeks. Muchos looking forward to that.

The fact that the other More Important Cities of Australia are being denied the final warms the cockles of my heart. It really does.

But Canberra is gonna need a bigger big screen.  Perhaps start with one from the 20th century.  While you shouldn't need your binoculars to see replays on the big screen, frankly my dear, I don't give a damn.  All right Mr DeMille, I'm ready for my closeup, but not on that tiny bigscreen.  If you build a new one, they will come.

I'll be back.